Review: Thoroughbreds

"I have a perfectly healthy brain. It just doesn't contain feelings. And that doesn't necessarily make me a bad person. It just means I have to work a little harder than everyone else to be good." Thus spoke Amanda (Olivia Cooke), newly released into the wilds of a tony Connecticut suburb after euthanising her family's horse.

Deadpan and literally without a care in the world, the sociopathic high schooler finds herself reunited with childhood friend Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy), a prim and proper sort who has been paid by Amanda's mother to socialise with her maladjusted daughter. Though their encounter is marked by awkwardness, it's clear that Lily is intrigued by Amanda. The two spend more and more time with one another, relaxing into a renewed friendship, one in which Amanda shares the various diagnoses she's received from her shrink (borderline personality disorder, severe depression, antisocial with schizoid tendency) as well as her technique for crying on cue, though both sides continue to eye one another warily.

Amanda is quick to suss out Lily's tense relationship with her stepdad Mark (a perfectly cast Paul Sparks), a contemptuously condescending sort that Lily tolerates so that she and her mom can continue to live the life to which they are accustomed. "Do you ever think about killing him?" Amanda wonders, a question which Lily instantly dismisses but soon revisits when Mark decides to enroll her into a boarding school for girls with behavioural issues. They decide to enlist the aid of a local drug dealer, beautifully embodied by the late Anton Yelchin as an endearingly pathetic loser, to be their fall guy but things do not go exactly as planned.

Writer-director Cory Finley crafts an elegant and venomous work, one that owes as much to Strangers on a Train as it does to Cruel Intentions. There is a finesse to the film that is almost startling for a debut feature, and there is no doubt that Finley has both a cinematic eye and a tremendously keen sense of atmosphere and pacing. Thoroughbreds never loses its hard and cynical center, which is as much a testament to Finley as it is to his two excellent leading ladies, who both incarnate their characters' respective sociopathies with razor-sharp precision and depth.

Thoroughbreds

Directed by: Cory Finley

Written by: Cory Finley

Starring: Anya Taylor-Joy, Olivia Cooke, Anton Yelchin, Paul Sparks, Francie Swift, Kaili Vernoff